You would think that when conducting an interview of someone, particularly to record their account of events in history, and in this case the Civil Rights Movement, you would go through the trouble to make sure your recording is of at the very least, decent quality, right? After all, what good is listening to someone voice their entire experience to you if it’s difficult to hear and sometimes impossible to understand? It’s not good at all! In fact, if anything it is an insult to the person you’re interviewing and a clear waste of their time!

Right now I’m taking a short break from typing to, of course, type. I will definitely have some joint pains by the end of this day (25k words typed so far). Today I have been typing out transcripts of two videos. The first one I started last week and just finished, which was two hours of a panel of speakers talking about the Freedom Summer of 1964 and Race Relations at Miami University and Western College for Women. The second video is of an interview conducted outdoors with a Mr. Bob Moses. The individual who conducted this interview is who I am specifically infuriated with.

The video was a good quality video, but the sound was absolutely terrible. Trying to catch every word Mr. Moses spoke through bouts of wind, and all sorts of ambient noises was the greatest, painstaking chore I have ever encountered. What kind of fool conducts an interview outside with an obviously rip-off digital video recorder without proper audio equipment? In fact, I’m confident the interview didn’t even know how to handle the camera considering there were moments where it randomly shut off and came back on – maybe one of those times was for a battery change. But there were deep and important details in moments where the wind of course was not cooperative that are now lost. Why waste this man’s time by recording on a shotty dvr outside? This interview could have easily been conducted indoors! Though I understand the point of being near the memorial that he was speaking of, the entire interview did not need to be on site.

I’m so furious by this that my feelings have taken me by surprise. I feel entrusted to accurately digitize and archive the information being given to me, and yet here the fools who are actually out there gathering this information are wasting everybody’s time. Any amateur with a camera and a few home videos would know better! I would actually have given more credit to my technologically inept father to have done a better job. After all, at least he would have the common sense to move the camera closer to the speaker! This fool, who sounds like a woman, needs to go apologize to this man for wasting his time, and then I want an apology from her for wasting mine. After which she can jump off a bridge for all I care. Someone who doesn’t know the basics of working a video camera does not deserve to be given such an important task in historical preservation.

Thank you for tolerating my venting. Below is a copy of a portion of this interview, I didn’t copy all the way to the end but you’ll get the picture if you skim through it.

As you can see there are parts that are just filled with asterisks (indicating I could not identify that single word) or … indicating a long pause, or a huge break in understanding. (ie. a ton of wind just made everything he said in 10, 15, 20 seconds impossible to understand). [break]s indicate a huge gap or 30 seconds of impossible to understand material, or the tape stopped and started again at a later time with obvious loss of context.

BOB MOSES:

So what I was thinking was, listening to some of the people who talked yesterday about how they found out about the project and, the way in which they determined right away that they had to be part of it. There was one, I was in the story of the so called groups, and so there was one person there who was a student at the University of Michigan and he decided not to study that night, and he was looking for things to do, for movies to go to, and he saw this little ad in the paper about someone coming to speak; that I was coming to speak about the Mississippi Summer project and so on a whim he went. And, that night, he decided to go. And then another person who was at Spelman college, taking a course with * who convinced her parents that this was something she had to do. There was another person who said that he was from an upper middle class background, his parents told him he had to work that summer. And he came across a description of the project and called his parents and asked them if this was something he could do as a job. And his parents couldn’t resist because they themselves, their people had been coming out of a kind of tradition of fighting for people’s rights. So there was no way they could resist, but what I thought was that somehow the force of attraction, if you think of the universe as forces of attraction and forces of dissolution, that the force of attraction of the universe called us all together to do this job, and that is all. That’s the way I make sense of it because there’s a sense in which the project never belonged to any organization. It was too complex, too controversial, too “out of wack” to belong to any group. So it didn’t really fully belong to someone… sort of speak, empty it up… it couldn’t belong, it could have belonged to * perhaps, but * couldn’t belong to itself. The forces of attraction pulled * together, the idea of the right to vote as the unifying force dissolved at the bay convention in 1964, as soon as the different offers were put on the table and some people decided they would move to become part of the mainstream political institutions because in one sense the project was about political access, right, * idea was that we shold use the right to vote to get political access. So once it became clear how we were going to get it and some people were offering access, they took that and so then the forces, dissolution, came into play. So * was itself … Mississippi freedom democratic party was born in the project but * couldn’t also … So, it’s like I think, put all these people together for just a brief period to do a particular job, and then it was disbanded.

Interview How did you come to be here at W.C. for women?

Well what happened * was assassinated in June of 1963 and you’ve got to think of 1963 as a really fateful year in this country’s history. And when we began with it, as it opened we were doing voter registration anyway. And we had a meeting with all the voter registration and * workers in the state, and…

Bells ringing… resumes.

So in 1963 opened, we were, working with voter registration… we had a meeting with all of the workers, and Jimmy Travis and myself and Randy Blackwell were driving back, we were taking Mr. Blackwell to Queenville to the airport. And so we were overtaken and kind of what people said later, grease gun, it’s like a machine gun, bullets, blew out all the windows in the car and Jimmy caught a slug in his neck. And so that set in a chain of events that brought Dick Gregory up to Greenwood and we all converged on Greenwood to do massive voter registration efforts, and we were arrested and put in jail. But it also brought Mega? up to Greenwood and Mega began coming up there with him regularly and was… talking at the voter registration meetings and then Birmingham started up. And a combination of Greenwood and Birmingham led Mega to startup his activities in Jackson, and then * from Greenwood went down…

So when Mega was murdered Bob Spike, who was the executive director of the commission on race for the National Council of Churches, decided that he would put his resources into the Freedom Movement in the south. And he finally decided to focus on Mississippi because it was the place where he could say he was working with everybody… NAACP, and King SCLC. He could say to his national constituency that he was working with all of them. So remember that doing that… and it was at the march of Washington that Bob approached me about coming and bringing his group and his resources into MI. The other person who was … activated to come to Mississippi since… [barely audible] and so he was looking, Bob Spike came down, and then after the march on Washington… and the movement as it was thinking through this idea of political access decided to run Henry and King in an interracial campaign for government. Now then, joined that effort by recruiting students from Stanford and Yale, and he was at that time Dean of students of Yale and he had been a dean at Stanford. So he brought those students down to participate in Freedom * for … which was happening in the Fall. So that Fall as Kennedy is assainated, and the movement was really soul searching around the issue of how do you make some kind of move which has a national impact and what Bob Spike does is he works with us to setup Freedom * in Pattysberg and this is happening around, in December and around the end of the year, and he is recruiting ministers from key Republican districts in the Midwest and bringing them down to walk on the picket line at ‘Pattysberg at the courthouse because the justice department has a suit against … who was the registrar so the whole movement in the state converged on ‘Pattysberg. And meeting there on the picket line I get thrown in jail and there is a little court case there but Spike is using that to bring pressure on Washington. He sends the ministers back to the various churches and they talk to their congregations and then the National Council of Churches organizes busloads of their congregations to go to Washington to lobby for the Civil Rights bill that is now on the docket since the march on Washington, Kennedy’s introduction of the … and now has a lot of heightened drama since Kennedy’s assassination and Johnson’s… so that’s on the one hand going on, all of this kind of steamrolling of events… and within the * who, there’s now an intense discussion that starts with the appearance of the Stanford and Yale students who work on the campaign about having such large numbers of students coming down in the Summer of ’64 and it splits us. It splits the Sneak? Workers, some of them very much enthused and in favor of this as a way to really make a national spotlight of the situation with the Yale and Stanford students, and the others complete oppose thinking that …

So we have literally I guess we’re in the middle of months of discussions back and forth. What I’m noticing and I’m not taking sides, what I’m noticing is that the people that we are working for all want the students to come back, and to… all of the people who… but so, in the middle of the * event we get a call from… and so I go over and do some, little investigation and Louis Allan was the person who witnessed * murder and who stepped forward to testify and when * Lee was murdered in 1961 the only response we could give was ourselves… they would have to kill us to get us out, in other words we couldn’t nationalize this murder and he left his wife and seven little kids, but we could say that we understand now sort of the depth of what we came down to do. We hadn’t been there in over a couple months and so that we can look into ourselves and say well this is something but we couldn’t think that we could attract enough people to actually do it. But we, so that’s what we did from ’61 thru ’62, ’63 and we were not at the end of ’63 and for me it was like a circle which closed when Louis Allen was murdered, but we were now in a position to have a different response. But that’s what tripped in my mind to say that well we should go ahead with this project because in many ways what part of what the murder symbolized was the defenselessness of the black people in Mississippi against the response of the white population in Mississippi to thte national movement to the… ?? the volunteers had gone down. They left June 20th that was that Sunday, but, Nikki had gone done with James and Andrew, Andy, a couple days before that because he had gotten word about the burning of the church and he was worried about where they were going to meet and getting ready for the volunteers who were going to that area, * county and… so he had already left and he got word of … that we had session with the first group of volunteers so, those three were gone and John Doa came up here, he had been up here for the first session and we got a call from him during the second session to come to Jackson and meet with … and we went down there to meet with Allan * and * had been asked by President Johnson to be the point person for establishing the first state office of the FBI in Mississippi. And then Doa said James Foreman and I had to go to the justice department to meet with * Marshall and one of President Kennedy’s close advisors, a historian, I forget his name but you can pull his name but.. So we went to meet with them and why I’m saying this is because the question that they asked, was and this the issue that was in the papers that we were actually the cause of this huge sort of violent response, and what I pointed out to Burke particularly, Burke really was knowledgeable on the situation, was that the violence started not in response to the call to have the Mississippi Summer project, the violence had actually started to the nation’s gathering at the march of Washington and President Kennedy’s decision to have a Civil Rights bill so all of the church burnings that happened all across the state, all of those were happening across the Fall during the months whether we were debating whether we should have this project or not> So I think of Louis Allan’s murder as a symbol of the defenselessness of the black population in Mississippi during that period moving from march on Washington, the bombing of the church in Birmingham, and the kind of outrage that was being poured on the black comm. n the fall of ’63. And of course ass we found out later there were young black men who were murdered anonymously so to speak. Who’s bodies were uncovered while they were searching for the body of * and *… so in my mind the, it was, that we couldn’t think that we were going to actually break through Mississippi system of apartheid without calling on the nation to actually do it. And so the bringing of the young people was the call to the nation and so they brought the nation with them inescapably into Mississippi and the murder of the sacrifice of Goodman and * sort of symbolized the anonymous murders over the years that no one would pay attention to. Because even when Mega was ass it’s not like the country stood up and said .. we can’t do this… so these young people came.. call to them… and from my point of view the only reason that we could do that was that we had, we had gone through and all the same kind of dangers that we were asking them to share with us, there was nothing that we were asking them to share that we hadn’t already decided that this was what we had to do. So that was the only really, base for them, kind of authenticity of the project. I think the project had great authenticity. So, you know one of the things that was a part of the project for me was that it wasn’t really possible to know the volunteers that came down. There were too many of them and the time was too short, and we were just all of a sudden altogether and then all of a sudden dispersed. And in a sense that is what had to happen so this weekend I got a little glimpse into the volunteers particularly in the historic circle that I was a prt of and the country really doesn’t know these people and the movement really doesn’t know. And this one here says Mississippi … [reads engraving] … dated Sunday, June 21, 1964. Now nobody knows who those 78 people were on those two buses. Exactly who were those 78 people? But there is a chance to still know who they were and it’s really important I think to not only know who they were but know where they went in Mississippi, where did each one go. Who was brave enough to take them in? Because the other part of the story that we don’t know anything about is the names and faces of the life stories of the people that embraced the volunteers when they arrived in Mississippi because all of these people, the black people, in these homes were extraordinary people in Mississippi and this country and it’s the interface between the people who were in Mississippi who were really at the grassroots under the heel of the system of apartheid and the young people who came down really to try to stand up to their own idea of what the country should be. And who will really move to do that through their own sense of what it meant for them to live and work and be a part of this country. It is the interplay between these two very different generations, experiences in ths country that we don’t know those stories and in some sense to me that is the heart of what happened that summer. So coming back here and meeting… [break] didn’t have a list [break] this place here really symbolizes one part of it. What would be nice would be to have the symbol in the state for the other part. That we could envision something like this, which is in the state, which has the names of the families that took these people in… and invites them into history.

Voice: Just in terms of this dedication to Andy, and Nikki and James. Because I’m sure that has an enormous effect on you. How does it feel to be standing in a way, in their presence?

I think it’s the same physical issue, the same feelings arise there. In other words the country could embrace Andy, Nikki, and James because the country had to imagine that their sons and daughters could also… but the country doesn’t know the names of the young students who died on… the country doesn’t know… and so just as we have something here which is remembering people who the country knows, part of the feeling, telling… should involve a memorial, we could have a memorial like this in Mississippi where along with James, Nikki and Andy, are all the names of the other people in Mississippi who died or were murdered as part of this struggle. And all along you can have the names of the common people who supported and made such a movement possible in the summer of ’64 so you could try to get the country to actually open up itself and place its own history… the ways in which our country moved to work itself Country’s always working itself so sometimes for better sometimes for worse, but. So here in a way it worked itself for the better. It involves the meeting of parts of the country that never meet. But have something like this in Mississippi. The polarity of those two would also symbolize the work that still has to be done.

VOICE: That’s a beautiful answer. It needs to be done. This was only erected in 1999. I was kind of surprised actually that it took until 1999 to appear.

Well you got to think that it wasn’t until the 1980s that you began to get into the history books and on the TV – it was “Eyes on the Prize” that broke open the idea that we should tell some of the history of what happened in the ‘60s in a different way. So it took, what over 25 years for the country to actually begin to think that it could be explored as history. So it wasn’t a history that the country could embrace, people in Mississippi quickly moved into the change and nobody moved quicker than white middle class Mississippians they moved quickly to with great size of relief and anticipation to become part of the country. So businesses could come in, airports could be built, and various parts of the country that were exclude could come into Mississippi and certainly many of those changes embraced very small populations of black Mississippi who entered the middle class but they didn’t embrace the people who worked to make it happen. It didn’t embrace the bunch of others and the grassroots people of Mississippi; except in the very important way that they were now part of a state which was part of the country as opposed as an isolated island within the country that was just setting up its own rules, in a country … to setup it’s own rules as to how to oversee black people. So they participated in that, and that’s no small thing. But they didn’t embrace the promise of a country for the opportunity, [mumble]…